Emergency services should as is be required to use GPS or similar, especially in the U.S. given the existence of the United States National Grid (https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NCAT/), as house numbers may be not be available for a variety of reasons. Previous discussions:
It should at least be an option. I called 911 about a situation some miles outside of town far from any street names. But I had the exact GPS coordinates and read them off to the dispatcher. To my surprise that dispatcher seemed to have no idea what GPS coordinates were.
I once had to call 911 at a local streetcar station, and since it didn't have an obvious address, being in the middle of a street, I'm trying to identify it by station name, and they had a very hard time of it.
GPS should be expected to be an option given its prevalence, the consideration that the supplement(s) are required to be derived using an electronic device - a telephone does not work without electricity, and the urgency to implement.
In the vast majority of applications you will get GPS coordinates even when the source is a non-GPS constellation. The WGS84 datum is the lingua franca of coordinate systems and what most systems expect by default if not otherwise specified.
When you call from a cell phone, public safety answering points get your gps data from the carrier. Landline calls have their associated address data sent. This is called e911 and has been a thing for over 20 years.
The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you.
Eventually, a 911 PSAP should (but does not always) eventually get decent geographical coordinates -- that's part of what the E911 system is intended to provide.
When it does work (and it usually does work): It's not always instant, it isn't always accurate (the first hit may just be the coordinates of a cell tower -- good luck!) and it doesn't always work inside of buildings. And for some callers some of the time, things like VOIP won't deliver the correct location to a PSAP because things are broken or databases are simply wrong.
And in the best case: It can only reveal the calling party's location, which is not necessarily the location where people actually need help. And it only necessarily reveals that calling party's location to the 911 operator.
It's still generally the job of a human dispatcher to relay that information to the boots-on-the-ground who will actually show up and help the people who need that help.
It's nice to think of it as some tightly-integrated system where somehow the information is, say, relayed automatically from the caller's phone, through CAD, and all the way to the dashboard satnav of an ambulance so they can just hop in and go.
But what usually happens (in my experience hanging around in 911 PSAPs) is that the location is relayed to first responders by human voice over radio.
And addresses are easy to relay by voice.
> The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you.
It's important to provide an address because addresses are useful to the 911 operator. E911 is awesome, but it is not an all-knowing, all-seeing system that is somehow born from perfection.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196402
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20970664
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359256
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829267
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046